Manuel Martínez

2 months ago | wbez.org | Maggie Hennessy |Mark Guarino |Manuel Martinez |Manuel Martínez |Amy Yee

The stout brick structure at 816 W. Armitage Ave. holds a kind of hallowed aura among diners of a certain age. My parents easily recall the “amazing” food and “perfect” service from their three-hour, nine-course dinner at Charlie Trotter’s namesake restaurant some 30 years ago. The “lobster purse” anecdote remains legendary in our house — when my mom gushed so effusively over a lobster-stuffed pastry course that staff brought her a second one for free.

2 months ago | wbez.org | Mark Guarino |Sofie Hernandez-Simeonidis |Manuel Martinez |Manuel Martínez |Courtney Kueppers

The Pitchfork Music Festival came very close to celebrating its 20th anniversary this July in Union Park. But late last year, the festival’s parent owner, Condé Nast, announced that it was permanently shuttering the Chicago festival. The news surprised many Chicago music fans, who’d come to rely on the festival as a place to discover music outside the dominant pop mainstream — music that spanned different genres and generations.

2 months ago | wbez.org | Sofie Hernandez-Simeonidis |Manuel Martinez |Manuel Martínez |Courtney Kueppers |Maggie Hennessy

The pole is nearly a dozen feet tall, but that doesn’t daunt a pair of actors climbing toward its top, one piggyback on the other. To an average onlooker, this may induce gasps of amazement or stomach pangs of stress, but at Lookingglass Theatre, it’s just another day. This is a rehearsal for Circus Quixote, an adaptation of the classic Miguel de Cervantes epic Don Quixote, opening Thursday.

Sep 26, 2024 | wbez.org | Alison Bowen |Graham Meyer |Morgan Ciocca |Manuel Martinez |Manuel Martínez

Friends since their childhood in the Chicago suburbs, Rebecca Little and Colleen Long met in their fourth-grade class in Flossmoor. In adulthood, they bonded over incomprehensible grief as both experienced shattering pregnancy losses. Little, a Chicago-area writer and mom of three living boys, had what she calls a “Bingo card” of loss — a chemical pregnancy, a miscarriage, a 20-week stillbirth and, finally, a TFMR, or termination for medical reasons, with identical twin boys at 23 weeks.

Sep 25, 2024 | wbez.org | Graham Meyer |Morgan Ciocca |Manuel Martinez |Manuel Martínez |Emmanuel Camarillo

In a city of busy chefs, Joe Flamm is among the busiest. The season 15 winner of Top Chef is the culinary director of Day Off Group, running the kitchens of the buzzing Rose Mary and BLVD Steakhouse in the West Loop. And he has a third restaurant on the way just a few blocks from the other two, tentatively timed to open later this year. It’s called Il Carciofo, after the Italian word for artichoke.